Follow The Lead

PlummMeanGreen · January 6, 2007

I agree with this, and I know you're referring to the City of Denton picking up the ball and running with it, but for UNT's part, I believe that UNT needs to also expand the focus to the corridors of both corridors of I35--IE: Involve the bedroom communities along the way from Denton to north Dallas, and I35W all the way to north FW. (Wow, that's a terrible sentence right there...)
There is no reason I should have to pass a billboard every morning on my way to work extolling the virtues of LSU, when it could just as easily be a UNT billboard. All of Denton County, Wise County, Collin...those should all be MG Territory. Nobody cares about SMU, so why not Plano and Richardson as well? Point is, UNT needs to be NORTH TEXAS' team--not just Denton's.
Communities such as the "Speedway Cities" of Justin, Rhome, Haslet, North and Southlake, Argyle, Lake Dallas/Highland Village/Lewisville, "Far North" FW...those are all areas that should be targeted, IMO. Hell, even McKinney and Decatur down 380 need coverage--Collin county has over 700K, and Wise county is growing at a rate twice the state average. UNT needs (IMO) to say "This is our turf." and treat it as such.
Having said that, I'm sure the AD's "people" are working on stuff that will probably be in a similar direction, so this is an exciting time, for sure.

Right on, Long Jim! (BTW, hope you, your wife and kids had a happy holiday season)...and do tell our mutual K-LUV radio DJ friend hello for me.

Hellsbells, LJ, even Sam Houston State Teacher's College :rolleyes: had a billboard in "downtown" Fort Worth about 2 years ago. I almost had a wreck off Belknap when I first saw the darn thing. For some reason, UNT is not much into billboards except for about 2 I have known of one of which was near Lewisville and the other near Denton as I recall. My auto has a UNT mini-billboard (window sticker) on its back window. Many of your autos do to and we'd all encourage you who don't have one to put one on auto's back window as well.

CHANGING DIRECTION: Some of you are talking about scheduling; one of the many things most of us appreciated about former NT Coach Hayden Fry was how he made playing the Big Boys an opportunity for his Mean Green football teams (and, quite frankly, for himself as well). :rolleyes: Just too bad there weren't the large number of bowl game opportunities back then that there are today because he had several "bowl worthy" teams.

FWIW, it wasn't beating Mo' Valley Conference-type schools that got Coach Fry his Big 10 HFC's gig (if you will).

Too many NT coaches since Fry left Denton have made our tough OOC schedules their own personal albatrosses and probable cause for their eventual downfalls and bitter attitudes toward "packing their office boxes" time, too. One even as recent didn't bother with or worry at all about being competitive with our OOC Big Boy's schedule (much to many of your's and my chagrin); and his predeccessor (Matt Simon) made Helwig's Big Boy scheduling his own personal Waterloo in MG Country, too. I really do feel new Mean Green HFC Todd Dodge because of his prior experience as a Mean Green assistant coach will have all this most valuable past history at UNT as a lesson for which he can learn. I think TD will know the kind of teams he will need to beat to get the Notre Dame job in other words; but then again, he may want to stay and build something very special in Denton, Texas, America, too. :clapping:

IMO, there are only about 10 NCAA D1-A jobs that I would consider to be "final stops" for any D1-A head football coach and we would all only be kidding ourselves if we thought the Phil Bennetts, the Gary Pattersons, the Guy Morris', the Steve Kragthorpes, the Art Briles', etc, etc, etc, would not listen to job offers from such higher echelon schools as those in the Big 6 conferences. Folks, all these kind of coaches eventually want a chance to play in front of crowds of 80-90,000 and for a realistic chance to win a national championship. Sadly, all the ex SWC schools who didn't make the Big 12 cut will probably never have that opportunity again (like they "theoretcially" had or did when they were in the now defunct Southwest Conference). Of course, there are some Big 12 schools that will most likely in our lifetimes play for an NC, either.

Edited January 6, 2007 by PlummMeanGreen